From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Destruction of the Twelve Colonies is a fictitious interstellar holocaust first depicted in the 1978 motion picture Battlestar Galactica, which set the stage for the subsequent television series. It is also the main premise for the 2003 miniseries re-imagining, which also spawned a television series.

Contents 1 Battlestar Galactica (1978) 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Prelude 1.2.1 Cimtar 1.3 The battle 1.3.1 The destruction of the Atlantia 1.3.2 The flight of the Galactica 1.3.3 Assault on the Colonies 1.4 Aftermath 2 The Reimagined Series (2003) 2.1 Battle of Ragnar 2.2 Aftermath 3 External links

After a thousand years of continuous war, the Cylon Alliance surprisingly offers to make peace through their agent, Count Baltar. The leaders of the Twelve Colonies and the Cylons agree to meet on a ship named Star Kobol to discuss the terms. The location of this ship is unknown, but it appears to have been on the edge of Colonial territory. The Colonials send a fleet of 5 Battlestars, Colonial warships that have survived the ongoing Thousand Yahren War, to rendezvous with their arch enemies, the Cylons and to escort the Quorum of the Twelve from the colonies to the historic peace conference near the old moon of Cimtar. The Cylons promise to send their Imperious Leader.

The Colonial fleet dispatched to escort the Quorum consisted of the President's Battlestar, Atlantia, and four others, the Galactica, Pacifica, Acropolis, and Triton. Each Battlestar has a complement of 150 Viper fighters. The war with the Cylons had lasted 1,000 yahrens and in that time both sides, human Colonials and Cylons, suffered heavy losses with no end in sight. The surviving Colonial Battlestar warships are under the command of President Adar of the Twelve Colonies, who while on the Colonial flagship, the Battlestar Atlantia, makes several precautions so that the fleet would be as non-aggressive as possible during the peace envoy attempts. No fighter squadrons from any ship are launched and the ships travel under the loosest of precautions. No communications are received from the Cylons while the fleet is in transit.

A Viper probe, led by Captain Apollo and his brother Lieutenant Zac of the Galactica's Blue Squadron, is sent out to patrol the flanks of the fleet. Near the moon Cimtar, a small planetoid inside a dense field of interstellar gas, they find their sensors are being jammed, but they visually spot two Cylon tankers, apparently using the moon as cover. This arouses their suspicions and they continue to investigate further. Deeper in the cloud, they find roughly 1,000 Cylon Raiders, without any Cylon Basestars. They are soon spotted and, with long range communications impossible, Apollo decides they must return to the fleet as quickly as possible to warn it of a pending attack. In a small skirmish with a Cylon patrol pursuing them, Zac's Viper is damaged and he begins to lag behind Apollo with only two of three Viper turbo engines working, but Zac insists that his brother continue the sprint back to the fleet.

Meanwhile, on the Battlestar Galactica, long range sensors begin to detect the patrol is encountering trouble. When Commander Adama informs the President, Baltar uses his influence to lull Adar into a false sense of security. Adama's request to launch his fighters in response is refused, so he instead holds a weapons drill to keep his fighters prepared to launch in case of an emergency. Later, when a wall of fighter-craft is detected rapidly approaching the fleet at attack speed, Baltar again fools Adar into thinking it is a welcoming committee and again refuses to allow him to order a scramble. However, all doubt of hostile intent is removed when it becomes obvious that the fighter preceding the wall, Zac's Viper, is being fired upon, and it is destroyed short of the fleet. At this revelation, Baltar immediately disappears, leaving Adar in stunned confusion while Adama, whose ship is the only one ready to fight immediately, orders a general fighter launch.

The Cylon fighters descended on the fleet from their left flank. Their primary targets were the launch tubes on the hangar bays and the propulsion systems in the stern. Their attacks were effective, knocking out virtually all of the battlestars' ability to launch a fighter screen. The Galactica was an exception; she managed to launch nearly all of her fighters. During the battle, the remaining Battlestars only succeeded in limited Viper launches.

The first target of the Cylon fighter horde was the flagship Atlantia, President Adar's ship and the central command for the fleet. Waves of fighters began a merciless assault, including suicide runs into the hangar bays and direct hits on the bridge. The battlestar succumbed to the constant attacks and exploded in a massive fireball. With the momentous loss of a battlestar, the Colonial fleet was in dire straits.

Commander Adama, concerned by the lack of basestars, decided to leave the fleet and retreat to Caprica to mount a defence against possible attacks. He abandoned his fighter screen, which continued to fight Cylon fighters until the last three battlestars in the fleet were destroyed. The Vipers then fought their way to the Colonies only to find the Galactica as the last surviving ship in the Colonial Navy.

While the Colonial fleet was engaged with the Raider horde, the Imperious Leader attacked the Twelve Colonies with three basestars. The attack began with strafing runs by fighters on planetary defences and civilian targets followed up by assaults by basestars deep in each planet's atmosphere. Cylon centurions disembarked and rounded up surviving humans for extermination. However, the small task force assigned to subjugate the Colonies failed to prevent about 220 civilian ships from escaping unoccupied spaceports.

With the great majority of humanity destroyed, Commander Adama decided to use the Galactica to protect the small civilian fleet and escort them away. He decided to lead the fleet to Earth, a mythical Thirteenth Tribe of humans lost to history. Unfortunately for the fleet, they were unable to properly fuel in their escape and food supplies were heavily contaminated. So they were forced to set course for Carillon which had a small tylium mine operation past the Nova of Madagon. In a bold move, the fleet followed Captain Apollo's proposal of crossing a heavily mined section of space as a shortcut, which was cleared beforehand by Captain Apollo himself and two of his closest friends, fellow Colonial Warriors Lt. Starbuck and Lt. Boomer.

That planet's surprisingly abundant fuel and recreational facilities turned out to be a trap arranged by the Cylons and their Ovion allies, from which the refugee fleet barely managed to escape and elude pursuit.

During the First Cylon War, the mechanical Cylons and Humans fought to a draw. An armistice was signed and the two sides drew a border between Colonial (Human) space and Cylon space. The Cylons withdrew into their own territory to form their own society, and generally avoided any contact with Humans for the next four decades. At the edge of Human space, an Armistice Station was built to allow Humans and Cylons to meet for diplomatic relations. Each year the Humans sent an officer; the Cylons sent no one -- until 40 years after the war ended, when the Cylons suddenly reappeared at Armistice Station with no warning. But now they no longer resembled machines; instead they looked exactly like ordinary Humans. The Cylons destroyed the Armistice Station, thus beginning their final assault on the Twelve Colonies and Humanity.

After destroying the Armistice Station, the Cylons launched a sneak attack against the entire Colonial fleet. Taking advantage of their immense knowledge of advanced technology, the Cylons exploited a backdoor in the Colonial military's software written into Dr. Gaius Baltar's programs by Cylon Number Six, a Cylon who had become Baltar's lover and who deliberately used him to find weaknesses in the Colonial defense systems he had designed.

Using the knowledge they had gained from the unwitting Baltar, the Cylons were able to override the sophisticated computer systems on each battlestar and viper fighter in the fleet and shut them down, thus rendering the ships defenseless. Within a few hours virtually every battlestar and fighter in the Colonial fleet had been destroyed, and the Twelve Colonies were helpless. Despite President Adar's offer to surrender, the Cylons ignored his pleas and began dropping powerful nuclear bombs on all of the Twelve Colonies. Casualties were extreme and within a few hours billions of Humans were dead. The Colonial Military and all its bases and most of its ships were destroyed and the Cylons quickly landed their clones and mechanized warriors to take control of each planet. Within 24 hours after their initial attack, only the battlestars Galactica and Pegasus had survived; although they would not learn of each other's existence for some time.

Following the destruction of Admiral Nagala's flagship, the Battlestar Atlantia, Commander William Adama of the Battlestar Galactica ordered the remnants of the fleet to regroup at Ragnar Anchorage for a counterattack. However, with nearly the entire Colonial military fleet destroyed, it was a civilian convoy lead by newly-sworn-in Colonial President Laura Roslin that responded to the orders. Facing limited options, Commander Adama chose to have the Galactica defend the convoy while each ship jumped into deep space, away from the destroyed colonies. The Galactica managed to hold off two Cylon basestars as ship after ship executed faster-than-light jumps to a safe location. When the civilian ships had jumped, the Galactica then joined them. However, only 50,000 Humans - out of 40 billion - had survived the holocaust.

After the fight at Ragnar, the fleet jumped past The Red Line and into uncharted space to find a new home. Eventually they discoved the new colony of New Caprica and were able to settle for a year before being invaded by the Cylons and captured. The fleet was able to escape but not without thousands of casualties and the loss of Battlestar Pegasus under command of Commander Lee Adama

• Battle of Cimtar at the Battlestar Wiki
• Fall of the Twelve Colonies at the Battlestar Wiki